Course Materials

Site leadership, Waterline Scripts, the bay’s roost network, formal reporting

Public interpretation guides, six scripts for different encounter contexts at the waterline

Structure and guidance for formal site management reports using field tool data

The canonical Australian synthesis of flight-initiation distance. What a Steward is reading on the bird at the waterline. Detection, Physiological, Alert, and Flight-Initiation distances, and the operational window between them. Filed under External Literature → Field Practice on Background Reading.

Of the three drivers of EAAF shorebird decline, disturbance, habitat loss, climate change, the first two are the ones policy can act on now. Murray 2014 measured the loss; Piersma 2016 showed the survival cost; Studds 2017 confirmed the flyway-wide pattern. Plus Murray 2015 review of the threats themselves. Main findings card synthesises the chain of evidence; four paper cards link to DOIs and open-access PDFs.

The science behind the wonder a Steward stands witness to. Six papers spanning a quarter century. Piersma & Lindström 1997 (the seminal phenotypic-flexibility paper) through Battley 2000 (the empirical demonstration), Landys-Ciannelli 2003 (the temporal sequence), to Piersma/Gill 2021 (the confirmation of the 1998 hypothesis). The bird that lands in Australia in September is not the bird that left Alaska. The bird that leaves in March is not the bird that arrived.

Curiosity material; not part of the conservation argument. What aeronautics, sleep medicine, quantum biology, and regenerative biology are learning from extreme migrants. Portugal 2014 (V-formation), Voelkl 2015 (cooperation), Rattenborg 2016 (sleep on the wing), Hiscock 2016 and Hore & Mouritsen 2016 (the quantum compass), plus a cross-reference to the medical implications of phenotypic flexibility. Read these to tell the godwit's story differently.